Victorious Insurgencies: Four Rebellions that Shaped Our World

4. Afghanistan: End of the Red Empire

4 Afghanistan End of the Red Empire In 2001, U.S. and allied troops entered Afghanistan and overthrew the grotesque Taliban regime that had long terrorized that country. The Taliban had taken power in the aftermath of the protracted and savage conflict between Soviet armed forces and most of the people ofAfghanistan.Any description of that Soviet-Afghan struggle generates a string of superlatives. For example, the popular resistance to the Soviet invasion constituted “the largest single national rising in the twentieth century.”1 The Afghan war was the longest military conflict in Soviet history: direct Soviet involvement extended from December 1979 to mid-1988. During the conflict Soviet forces reached the city of Qandahar, the southernmost penetration by Russian power since the days of Peter the Great. The Soviets pursued one of the most destructive counterinsurgency campaigns ever seen, and one of the least successful, providing a textbook example of how a major power—or any power—should not wage a counterinsurgency. The Soviet armed forces suffered their clearest reversal since the fall of Nazi Berlin, the first time a Russian army had been decisively checked by insurgents in modern history. The war provided the arena for the biggest CIA clandestine operation in that organization ’s history. It was perhaps the most satisfying experience the Americans ever had with guerrilla warfare. The Afghan insurgents received material help from an exceedingly heterogeneous group of states. All of these circumstances helped to stimulate forces that exerted the most profound effects on the Soviet empire and indeed the entire global configuration. In the end, the Soviets withdrew their 168 ■ Victorious Insurgencies troops from Afghanistan, but that turned out to be only the first of such withdrawals. The Country When the author of these pages was a boy, “Afghanistan” was a word, like “Timbuktu,” used to denote unimaginable remoteness. But the historian Arnold Toynbee described Afghanistan as one of the two great crossroads of cultural dispersion from prehistory to the Renaissance. Lying astride the principal trade routes between Persia and India, Afghanistan links the Middle East and South Asia. It also constitutes the intersection of Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The country is roughly the combined size of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, or Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio. Stupendous mountain ranges fanning out from the towering Hindu Kush are interspersed with fertile valleys. At the time of the invasion there were no railways and few real roads; Norway, another mountainous country, with half the area ofAfghanistan, had about twenty times the paved road mileage. The population is highly diverse ethnically and linguistically, speaking perhaps thirty languages and dialects; Dari, the Afghan version of the Persian tongue, has long served as a lingua franca. Before the Soviet invasion, theAfghans numbered about 15.5 million, of whom the 6 million Pushtuns were numerically and politically the most important. From very early times, “the Pushtoons [sic] have been characterized as turbulent, warlike, predatory and revengeful.”2 Yet the leader of the first official British mission to Afghanistan found them “fond of liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependants , hospitable, brave, hardy, frugal, laborious and prudent” as well as “less disposed than the nations in their neighborhood to falsehood, intrigue, and deceit.” Prostitution was almost unknown “until the arrival of the free-spending [British].”3 The “ideal male personality type in Afghan society [was] the warrior-poet.” The Pushtun moral code included a prohibition on killing women or children or musicians, or anyone who had asked for mercy or was found in a mosque. In the view of at least one visitor, “quite possibly the Afghans [were] the most hospitable people in the world.”4 Afghanistan ■ 169 During World War II, Afghanistan provided a refuge for numerous Jews seeking to escape the European holocaust. Persian-speaking Tajiks composed about one-fifth of the population . In the center of the country there were at least 1 million Hazaras; Mongolian in origin and Shiite in faith, these have often been slaves or servants. Many other ethnolinguistic groups were present as well. Kabul, the capital, with about nine hundred thousand inhabitants, was by far the largest city. Preinvasion Afghan society was overwhelmingly rural, made up in large part of independent farmers. Great landholdings were relatively rare. Afghanistan was a poor country: per capita income on the eve of the Soviet invasion was about $168, and the literacy...